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5 Aug 2009

Life After Redundancy

I was made redundant about 2 months ago. The reason why I was made redundant was because my previous company cut slightly under 30% of its staff. Apparently, online retail companies are not doing so well and my former company can add to that statistic.

Personally, I thought that letting go of so many people was very risky. A lot of expertise and system knowledge was lost instantly, particularly in IT. In addition, there had been a few redundancies in the previous 6 months that forced the remaining people to do other people’s work. The question remains, is it possible for a company to be able to respond to the market with a skeleton crew that mainly maintains the existing systems.

Perhaps this is a feeling that everyone gets when they leave a job – “They won’t be able to last without me!”, but the truth of the matter is, they probably will.

As for me, I ploughed the unsympathetic fields of job advertisements. I wasn’t particularly encouraged. My main gripe was that some 8-10 months ago, even if I only had half the experience the companies were looking for, I would still be considered. Now, you basically have to have 125% of what the job requires in terms of experience which necessarily means that you need to lower your asking price. There really was/is a lot of very skilled and experienced people looking for work and you get the feeling that they have been waiting in line a lot more then you have.

There is a happy ending to my story. I did manage to find a job and I now work for a search engine marketing agency. This would mean that I would get to work with a lot of data on a day-to-day basis and be able to learn more about statistical analysis and data mining.

What I took away from this experience, is to be careful of small and “exciting” companies, because they are the first ones to get rid of people when things turn bad.The other thing is if you are spending a lot of time at home, then spend it with your wife.